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Google to Create New META Tag...

searchengineland.com — The "Unavailable After" tag will allow webmasters to create expirations for pages with time-sensitive data... No more "breaking news" from 5 years ago...

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  • Blackmane, on 10/11/2007, -3/+25That sounds a very useful tag to use.
    • liquidcoooled, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3There are practical uses, but it will backfire and end up being used for something else later.
      Maybe Microsoft quietly dropping parts of its documentation or companies removing sensitive material.
      Damnit, google should keep the index with the information that is browsable, if the company wants it to become Unavailable, they can take it off the web.

      (Having said that, pinetrees suggestion below should be used and we should be able to instruct google to search only for recent documents: "age: under 3 months" or similar)
      • jrbrewin, on 10/11/2007, -2/+1"Quick! We're getting some bad news about google in the press... someone knock up a really dumb and obvious idea into a press release to try and deflect some of that negative energy" - Google PR.
      • dtiziani, on 10/11/2007, -0/+0if companies want to keep users off some page, they should close access to it. And it's pretty simple to block the bots from indexing some content, so no points here.
  • pinetree, on 10/11/2007, -8/+93Here's a crazy idea -- how about putting times/dates on pages and letting the reader decide whether or not the content is still relevant for him/her instead of of removing things and leaving the web full of broken links? The author's "breaking news from 5 years ago" is a perfect example of something that should NOT be removed. News from 5 years ago is useful to historians, researchers, etc.
    • iWasHere, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3I think this is a great idea, but would be best implemented in some sort of 'social networking circle' such as Digg.
    • samadam, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4rather, they should do this by default and have an option to search without time limits.
    • selrahc, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2This wouldn't necessarily remove the page, just it would tell the Googlebot to ignore it after a set time. It would be very useful for the reasons presented in the article
    • conmulligan, on 10/11/2007, -0/+7From the article: " The unavailable_after tag will allow you to tell Google when Googlebot should no longer crawl that page". This just means Google will no longer include that page in search results.

      Content providers who think their published works could be useful to historians or researchers can choose not to use the tag.
    • leksdraven, on 10/11/2007, -1/+0Maybe some sort of discrete archive should suffice, e.g. Google History.
    • Jeffler, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2The problem is that most people will ignore the date anyway if the content seems good - how many times have we seen this on digg?
  • noPCtoday, on 10/11/2007, -2/+16by the way, A list of googlebots META tags:
    http://www.webmarketingnow.com/tips/meta-tags-uncovered.html#google
  • origclubsoda, on 10/11/2007, -0/+32If only Digg would delete BREAKING from story titles.
    • yingjai, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3I still don't get why people do it.
    • Derrekito, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2people would just use: BREAK, NEW, or some other kind of annoying attention getter.
  • cephelo, on 10/11/2007, -3/+5I wish they would have used a hyphen instead. Underscores look so ugly. Is there a matching HTTP header for this?
  • SirDaShadow, on 10/11/2007, -2/+22'No more "breaking news" from 5 years ago...'

    but....but then Digg would not exist....

    Thank you, I'll be here all night.
  • mattmollysdad, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4now would be a nice time for digg to come up with something like that... like todays story about the Gov't using LSD on people... that story was front page news in the 1970s...so unless we r into history lessons... someone should be able to tag it as useless, old news
  • pwallroth, on 10/11/2007, -2/+2Brilliant.
  • Junkyarddawg, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3Me no like.
    It's bad enough that Google favoritizes new pages over old pages, and that newspapers tend to move articles to "archive" after a few weeks, I certainly don't want Google to start removing articles while they're still available.

    Like others have said: at the very LEAST there should be an option to ignore this flag in the advanced search.
  • MikeonTV, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4Or you not be so lazy and just delete the page.
    • tortureking, on 10/11/2007, -2/+1Delete pages? Every hit counts, man.
  • RyeBrye, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3This sounds an awfully lot like the cache expiration response header, but I guess it has it's uses also - particularly that most web designers don't know ***** about response headers, and changing response headers for every page could be a PITA...

    Still - Google could just use that response-header cache expiration to set a time that the Googlebot should delete the page from the index if it is not recacheable after that time.

    Putting an "unavailable_after" tag on a page sounds cool - but it will probably be misused.
  • Sparkster185, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2As someone who works for a company that does web-harvesting (non-profit via the NDIPP grant) this is awesome.
  • ocram, on 10/11/2007, -1/+11Isn't that the purpose of the 'Expires' meta tag?

    http://www.submitcorner.com/Guide/Meta/expires.shtml
    • conmulligan, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1As far as I know Google ignores the Expires tag for some reason or another.

      Fair and balanced.
    • julianrod, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1I was thinking the same thing. Instead of reinventing the wheel... why not use the tools that already exist?
  • mmikeyy, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1Doesn't this fit in nicely with some of the changes that are being developed in google labs. http://www.google.com/experimental/ the timeline one in particular.
  • ricksite, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3I wish e-mail could be set with an expiration date. When someone sends an e-mail like, "I brought cookies, they are in the break room.", it is only relevant the day the email was sent. With an expiration date, it could be filtered or marked for deletion after the date passes.
  • .Steven, on 10/11/2007, -0/+5You mean value? meta is the tag...
  • ihascheezburger, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1This is exactly what Google needs.
  • stinkfart, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2Buried as blogspam.
  • th3wiz4rd, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Good idea, but what if you want to get 'expired' results for some reason? There should definitely be an option to include expired pages in a search.
  • damnhandy, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1What was wrong with an HTTP 410 Status? This seems redundant and Google-specific.
  • 007ami, on 10/11/2007, -0/+0This would allow the webmaster to identify expiring content, instead of Google having to eliminate entire directories of useful info. I like it!! Hooray!
  • rienglass, on 10/10/2007, -0/+0thats bad.thanks for the info anyway
  •  

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